C-Rank Ranked Match — Not A Hair's Breadth Off

The instant the ricochet catches me, I bring the sniper rifle in my right hand to bear on the submachine gun in Tsubasa’s left, while the Bullet Piece I’d sent on ahead lines up on her head. The strike at her head yanks her attention up top, and my shot buries itself in the submachine gun.

Submachine gun destroyed.

“As expected! You never just go down easy, do you!!”

The two Aegis she spent on the ricochet are far off now, so I can ignore them. Her remaining barriers come down to one Aegis, twenty-two Shield Pieces, and the extra armament (black box) she added with Weapon Plus.

“One more!”

Tsubasa materializes yet another submachine gun.

So she did mean to fire two at once from the start.

Firing both submachine guns together, she’d scatter the spray into a diffuse ricochet off the Aegis to finish me. That must have been her plan all along. But Tsubasa has only her left hand now, so she can manage just one at a time. Good thing I shaved off her right arm back in that clash.

Tsubasa opens up on me with the submachine gun. The rounds ricochet far behind me, but I dodge those too.

“A flawless ricochet…!”

Passable precision, I’d say. Put a number on it and I’d give it seventy points. Her aim is accurate, but the rounds cluster too tight; she’d do better to scatter them across a wider spread. Bunched up like this, they’re easy to slip.

“Dust Mirage.”

I materialize my Special Cloak, the Dust Mirage. There’s no point at all in raising my Stealth now. My aim lies elsewhere.

Conceal Shot.

I hide the rifle’s muzzle beneath the cloak.

“That’s bad news!!”

Alarm flickers across Tsubasa’s face.

At this range, dodging a rifle shot without seeing the muzzle and the trigger is impossible. But wall off her front with an Aegis and she loses sight of me — and then she can’t respond when I draw the M1911. She has only one choice.

Tsubasa covers two vital points with Shield Pieces and levels the submachine gun at me, and I level my sniper rifle at the gun. An even trade: my rifle destroyed by her fire, her submachine gun by my shot.

“So then…”

“My last armament…!”

I take up the M1911. There’s no time. Dawdle and this ends in a draw.

A draw is no good to me. What kind of sniper fails to put a round clean through the prey she’s marked?!

“Tsubasa wins.”

Tsubasa takes the one remaining Aegis in her left hand. I aim the M1911 at her and fire. She dodges the first shot, then a second.

Fast!

This isn’t the speed of a Guardner. Tsubasa moves as though the shield were hauling her along.

“She’s accelerating with the Aegis’s thrusters too…!”

She’s running on her own frame’s thrusters plus the Aegis’s. That lets her push past her usual speed, and it opens up more lines she can take.

“Exactly~! This trick burns through EN like crazy, though! But there’s no need to hold back anymore!!”

I can’t get a bead on her. Three shots, four, all wide.

Now’s the moment, I think.

The truth is, the instant I triggered the Dust Mirage, I quietly slipped Bullet Pieces into the shadow of the cloak and hid them in the lake at my feet. They traveled through the water, and now they lie in wait to either side of Tsubasa’s feet, eighty centimeters off, too close for her to evade on reflex.

Bullet Piece!!

The Bullet Pieces fire. Laser rounds streak toward Tsubasa’s waist.

“—I’d noticed, you know. Shiki.”

“?!”

Shield Pieces stop the Bullet Pieces’ strike.

“A shot from that range… there’s no way she could react…?!”

“I saw it coming: you hiding the Bullet Pieces in the lake. That’s why I kept watch on the water the whole time. The faint sway of the surface, the faint sounds — I didn’t miss a single one.”

Tsubasa slashes the Bullet Pieces apart with the Aegis’s blade.

“Kh—!!”

Refusing to give up, I keep firing the M1911: a fifth round, a sixth.

“A pointless struggle.”

Tsubasa dodges them with ease.

“…An unguardable round. But on its own, it can’t catch a Space Girl. Without the Bullet Pieces or another gun, landing it is impossible.”

I fire my seventh round at Tsubasa’s face. She dodges it with a light toss of her head.

“It’s useless, I keep telling you.”

“N-no…”

“Come on, Shiki, don’t go putting on such an unsightly show, hm? I want the finale dressed up nice and spectacular.”

I loose the M1911’s final shot, only for Tsubasa to slip the round with a light twist of her body.

“A-ahh…”

Out of ammo. I pull the trigger, but nothing more comes.

“See? In the end, everything moves just the way Tsubasa wants it to.”

I drop the magazine to reload. But in that instant, two Aegis come charging in from behind me. I manage to evade, but my right hand is knocked aside, and I drop the M1911 into the lake.

“Crap—?!”

“I was waiting for the moment you reloaded. —And now, the final curtain.”

Tsubasa thrusts the Aegis in her hand out in front and accelerates on her thrusters, coming at me in a charging strike. To stay clear of the Aegis’s line of cannon fire, I sink low and drop to one knee.

Two Aegis are trailing Tsubasa. Even if I dodge this charge, I can’t evade the follow-up from those two.

Tsubasa… you have a sharp mind. So you surely know I still have one armament I haven’t used. Even so, you must have decided that as long as you crushed the G-AGE, I’d have no way to stop that charge.

And you’re right. Even if I had an assault rifle tucked away, or a sniper rifle, or a bazooka, I couldn’t stop that charge. There’s no cutting through a shield’s durability in a single instant. Retreat backward on my thrusters and I leave the safety area: certain defeat. Leap left, right, or up, and those two trailing Aegis run me down, and that’s the end. To dodge that charge, with your own frame’s Thruster Boost folded into it, I’d have to break my stance so wide open there’d be no margin left to slip the pursuit.

It’s perfect, Tsubasa. Choosing to finish it with that shield charge was a flawless call.

…That is, if I’d fired the G-AGE dry.

Thank you, Tsubasa. To the very end, you…

I draw the other handgun tucked into my belt. It’s the one I materialized alongside the Dust Mirage and kept at the small of my back: the trump card (Joker) I’d truly wanted to bury beneath the cloak.

“It all went just as I planned.”

With the handgun in my grip, I fire.

The round pierces Tsubasa’s shield and drives clean through the center of her chest.

“Ha…?!”

The Aegis shatters apart. With her vital point and her thruster destroyed in the same instant, Tsubasa’s momentum bleeds away; she’s flung off at a wild angle and tumbles across the lake.

“N-no way… are you telling me you had two guard-piercing handguns…?!”

Sinking to her knees, wringing out the last of her strength, Tsubasa puts the question to me.

“No. There’s only one G-AGE.”

Tsubasa’s eyes flick back and forth between the handgun floating in the lake (the M1911) and the gun in my hand (the G-AGE), its spitting image.

“Then… why…?!”

“From the moment I got here right up until now, the handgun I was using was nothing but an M1911, painted in the very same colors as the G-AGE.”

“?!”

Ever since I reached this lake, I’ve been fighting with the fake G-AGE ChaCha made for me. Just an M1911. An M1911 with no special ability whatsoever. It’s a dummy gun, the second-best plan I set up in case Tsubasa dodged the real G-AGE, or in case I used that one earlier on Kurenai or Ren and word of it got out before I could turn it on Tsubasa.

Tsubasa looks up at me, her face twisted, nothing like an idol’s. She’s put it together, I think. Every last scheme that led here.

“What you were so desperately dodging was a peashooter your Armor could have swatted aside with ease.”

Cracks race across the whole of Tsubasa’s body.

“What a… monster—!!”

Letting her see through the Bullet Pieces was intentional too. I wanted her to take them for my final move, when a Bullet Piece attack could never have been fatal in the first place. Missing with every M1911 round up to now was intentional as well. If even one had grazed the shield or grazed Tsubasa, it would have given away that the gun was a fake.

Running dry was deliberate, of course. Pulling the trigger so pathetically was deliberate too, a way to stage my own helplessness. Dropping the M1911 was deliberate. I let it catch on the Aegis and fall on purpose.

Letting her target my reload was deliberate as well. Earlier, I’d shown her a single reload, teaching her that I couldn’t swap the M1911’s magazine in a heartbeat. In truth I can do it faster, but I slowed it a touch, to just under the threshold of notice, and dressed it up as an opening. And since I had only one hand to work with, that reload must have looked like the finest opening (bait) of all.

I layered act upon act, staging upon staging.

All to loosen your guard and draw you to a spot no luck and no talent could carry you clear of. All to land this one shot.

“Not a hair’s breadth off.”

Tsubasa is deleted, and Marshmallow Smile’s victory is sealed.